Clonezilla 3: Copy and clone disk images to your heart's content
- Reference: 1653645729
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2022/05/27/clonezilla_3/
- Source link:
Remember Norton Ghost? It was discontinued nearly a decade ago now, in 2013. There are lots of alternatives to it out there, including commercial ones, but [1]Clonezilla is handy because it can handle almost any disk format, and it's totally free. [2]Version 3 just appeared and it's got a bunch of new features, including support for Apple APFS, ChromeOS Flex, and Linux drives encrypted with LUKS.
Clonezilla is not a general-purpose tool, or a graphical live desktop for general disk work. If you want that, try SystemRescue 9, which [3]we looked at earlier this year .
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Clonezilla is more focused. It's a small (roughly 350MB) live Linux ISO image which boots into text mode – in a choice of resolutions – and it copies disks, and that's pretty much all. (To be fair, it does have a memory-tester and a copy of FreeDOS 1.0 built in for emergencies. It would be good to see that [5]upgraded to FreeDOS 1.3 .)
[6]
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Choose either the i686 (32-bit) or x86-64 ISO file, download it, and then write it onto a USB key, or just [8]copy the file onto a Ventoy key . Even burn it onto a CD or DVD if you're retro. You then boot the machine whose disk you need to duplicate and copy away.
Clonezilla also supports PXE boot over the network, and there is a special [9]server edition which uses [10]DRBL to let you boot a whole LAN full of blank workstations off a single server and provision them that way.
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Once booted, it duplicates or images partitions from a local drive to another drive. The destination can be a local disk or a share on a server.
It supports almost every disk format out there. On Linux, ext2, ext3, ext4, reiserfs, reiser4, xfs, jfs, btrfs, f2fs and nilfs2; on Windows, FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, exFAT and NTFS; on Macs, HFS+ and APFS; on the big three BSDs, UFS; Minix's filesystems, and on VMWare ESX, VMFS3 and VMFS5. So it covers most options, except perhaps ZFS and very old Macs.
[12]Minimal, systemd-free Alpine Linux releases version 3.16
[13]Original killer PC spreadsheet Lotus 1-2-3 now runs on Linux natively
[14]Version 251 of systemd coming soon to a Linux distro near you
[15]New audio server Pipewire coming to next version of Ubuntu
Unix graybeards may now be thinking "but I could do that with dd ," which is perfectly true, but the advantage of understanding the file systems being copied is that Clonezilla only copies blocks that are in use, which can make the process dramatically quicker.
The new version is based on Debian "sid" as of May 22, 2022, and has the latest stable kernel, version 5.17. Both Clonezilla and DRBL are put together by a [16]team led by Steven Shiau at the Taiwanese [17]National Center for High-performance Computing .
It's one of those tools that either sounds great, or you can't imagine why you'd need it. If you're in the latter group, permit us to offer an example of why it might be handy even if you aren't a network administrator.
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A fairly common scenario is wanting to upgrade an old laptop with an SSD drive. Grab a spare USB key, format it with Ventoy and drop Clonezilla and SystemRescue onto it. Buy a $5 USB-to-SATA cable along with the new drive. (If it's a desktop, you can even skip that part.) Attach the SSD as a second drive. Boot Clonezilla and duplicate your old hard disk onto the new superfast drive. Optionally, start SystemRescue and use GParted to resize the partition. Shut down, swap drives, and you're done, and have just saved the cost of a commercial disk-copying tool that costs as much as a low-end SSD. ®
Get our [19]Tech Resources
[1] https://clonezilla.org/
[2] https://sourceforge.net/p/clonezilla/news/2022/05/stable-clonezilla-live-300-26-released/
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/24/systemrescue/
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/storage&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YpD1obqg-znTMjQAhXtwaQAAANQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/23/freedos_13/
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/storage&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YpD1obqg-znTMjQAhXtwaQAAANQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/storage&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YpD1obqg-znTMjQAhXtwaQAAANQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/10/friday_foss_fest/
[9] https://clonezilla.org/clonezilla-SE/
[10] https://drbl.org/
[11] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/storage&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YpD1obqg-znTMjQAhXtwaQAAANQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/26/alpine_linux_316_released/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/25/lotus_123_for_linux_appears/
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/24/version_251_of_systemd_released/
[15] https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/24/new_audio_server_pipewire_coming/
[16] https://clonezilla.org/developers/
[17] https://www.nchc.org.tw/
[18] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/storage&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YpD1obqg-znTMjQAhXtwaQAAANQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[19] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: SSD
Back in the days of NT4 & Win2k, my sure fire way to improve a computer's performance was to re-install Windows.
Re: SSD
Its even faster if you start with a fresh install rather than cloning.
@Craig 2 - Re: SSD
That's exactly what I did to my venerable 15 years old Dell Latitude laptop and it is still pretty usable these days. The only Microsoft supported OS is Windows XP and that would be fine with me but, unfortunately, Mozilla Firefox stopped being updated a very long time ago on this platform. Good news is Linux Mint latest version works just fine so the machine is not yet ready for the landfill.
Re: @Craig 2 - SSD
♻️ Not that electronics or any laptop should ever see the inside of a landfill, of course.
I use Clonezilla...
...for monthly backups on my home LAN. I start a VM with the the live cd (no other storage) that uses the host's filesystem cache, select the Lite Server option once it's booted, and mount the NFS share on my file server. Then I reboot each of my computers one by one and boot them from the network using Clonezilla's iPXE and back up the partitions. No need to mess with USB drives at all.
Liam…
> Unix graybeards may now be thinking "but I could do that with dd,"
Would you mind not spoiling my comment next time? :'(
Re: Liam…
dd is one of the included tools for reading or writing an image. this just makes it a little easier. everyone wants easier greybeards and assumptive young ones alike.
The provisioning via PXE could be handy though, especially when working on development that requires real hardware to test.
In a previous life PXE mode was a lifesaver provisioning 30-something PC's in a uni lab environment that students would break, part of the training, almost weekly.
Cloning a golden image on 30 PC's every Friday while sitting back and relax was perfect intro for pub time.
I built a process to do that two or three times daily using Dos Ghost (v 6.0 IIRC - pre Norton bloat!) from a selection of OS images stored on a normally physically disabled hard disk. The local storage allowed a guaranteed 10 minute turnaround of a class full of machines between lessons. I believe I even had a Solaris build in there for the particularly adventurous at one point ...
Its been a while since i used Clonezilla but in my old job working for a schools IT dept it was used regularly to restore the OS on PCs after a HDD died from a master image.
I do recall that it couldn't restore a partition to another a disk smaller than what the original one was you were cloning from, even if the actual amount of data to copy was lower.
Eg if you had a 250GB partitions with 100GB of data, you could only copy it to a disk of 250GB or greater not a 200GB disk even though the data would fit on there, as Clonezilla couldn't resize partitions on the fly.
This was a slight issue if you used a different manufacturers drive where one was actually 250GB and the other was only 249.9GB. So we started leaving the last couple of GB unpartitioned on the drives to get around that problem.
"This was a slight issue if you used a different manufacturers drive where one was actually 250GB and the other was only 249.9GB. So we started leaving the last couple of GB unpartitioned on the drives to get around that problem."
I remember chatting with an admin of a university data centre. He did the same thing because he'd found swapping out a disk in a RAID array caused the same issue even through the replacement drive was the same manufacture, same model number. Once bitten, twice shy.
Clonezilla is powerful, flexible, comprehensive and great for confident and knowledgeable users. But Macrium Reflect is rather more user friendly.
I use Clonezilla, but I wish...
I use Clonezilla quite often and for all of my cloning needs (Windows & Linux systems), the interface requires some getting used to, at least for me it did.
My only wish/request is that I wish the developers would move to an OS that did not utilize systemd. For this specific (single-use) application, I would think that it wouldn't matter and it only encourages the (systemd) crap to continue.
I almost stopped using it when Clonezilla updated to an OS that used it. I still use the earlier versions (when I can) that didn't have systemd.
Thanks!
Help me out a little. My laptop has a 125GB SDD. I want to put in a new 250GB SDD. Is Clonezilla3 the tool I need? Or should I drop Ventoy on a USB then Clonezilla?
Keep it simple
You don't need Ventoy, that's just a selector for different bootable images, where you would be selecting Clonezilla3.
SSD
"duplicate your old hard disk onto the new superfast drive"
Probably the fastest way to revive an ageing PC and make it useful again. Chuck in some extra RAM and you're golden for a few more years.
Not used Clonezilla, Macrium Reflect does the job for me and it's been painless and reliable. (and free for typical users)